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Friday, 6 July 2012

Guest Post - Why I Became a Crime Writer by John Barlow

Why
I became a crime writer.

At
the beginning of my writing career I was labelled a ‘literary’ writer. That was
fine, and I tried to live up to it. About three years ago I had an idea for a
cycle of stories based on the Grimm’s fairy tales, but modern, grown-up
versions. Literary ones. I wrote
several of these stories. In one of them a snowy-white Hollywood starlet gets poisoned
on LSD at an orgy of seven midgets. I did it as an American noir, and I showed
it to my agent. Do it as a full-length novel! she said.

The
novel, WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO JERRY PICCO?, was shown to half a dozen big
publishers in New York. But there were no takers for my porno-noir about a drugged-up
fifteen year-old virgin and her well-hung midget lover. Strange. The crime
publisher Mulholland very nearly bought it, then shied away. The novel was
quickly forgotten, and I moved on.

However,
last year I brought the novel out as an ebook, using the pseudonym Joe Florez.
I did it as a way of testing the emerging ebook market, and I quite enjoyed the
process. At about the same time I made an unusual discovery: my uncle John had
been an arms dealer. He was also suspected of stealing munitions from the
British army, and when he boarded a flight home from Amsterdam in 1984, British
police were waiting for him at Heathrow. It was too late; he was found dead on the
plane, his throat cut.

There
are all sorts of theories as to what Uncle John had been doing. Apparently he’d
made a lot of trips to Libya, and there was also rumours that he was supplying
para-military groups in Ireland. His widow claimed publically that he’d been in
contact with an organisation (which she wouldn’t name) that wanted him to work for
them under cover. She vowed to fight for the truth, but nothing ever came of
it. John was quickly forgotten.

What
struck me as curious, when I saw the press cuttings and learned something about
the case, was that I’d never heard about it before. He was actually a
half-uncle on my father’s side, but nobody had ever mentioned the nature of his
death or the job he’d been doing. After getting used to the idea that he might
have been involved in some pretty awful things, what amazed me is how family life
went on regardless, presumably as it had done while he was flying off to
Tripoli back when Gaddafi was at the height of his terrorist-supporting powers.
Uncle John had two young daughters and lived in a pleasant suburb of Leeds. He
had a normal life.

I
decided to write a crime novel about this contradiction. HOPE ROAD is not about
Uncle John himself, although it is set in Leeds. It’s about a criminal family,
and specifically about a ‘non-criminal’ son in that family. I was interested to
explore what it might be like to grow up with a career criminal for a father,
yet to reject that background and ‘go straight’. That’s what my family must
have been doing all those years, tactfully rejecting one of their own, not only
the manner of his death, but also what he did.

As
I developed my main character, John Ray, I began to think about structure. I
wanted him to be an amateur sleuth, using his family’s connections to solve a
crime. But I also wanted to bring out the tensions inherent in this situation,
and to do this I decided to give him a girlfriend: a police detective. As the
novel grew, it drew more and more on the dynamics of this relationship. The
detective is called Denise Danson, and I reckon she might get her own plot in a
future novel.

Finally,
as I was writing the book, two more things happened. Firstly, HOPE ROAD
involves a subplot revolving around fake money, and quite by chance I got the
opportunity to meet a real money counterfeiter. I learned a lot of details
about the ‘funny money’ trade from him, especially about what it’s like to ‘pass
off’ counterfeit banknotes in large numbers. Initially it was nerve-wracking to
meet a professional criminal. But then I thought back to my own family!
Secondly, the West Yorkshire Police were kind enough to offer me access to
Leeds CID. I was assigned a detective, and I consulted with him on matters of
police procedure and other plot details. Since I was writing about the very same
Special Crimes department in Leeds, I considered this a sign: I’d made the
right decision to turn to crime.

You
can buy HOPE ROAD from Amazon.co.uk, or from various other vendors (see John’s
website).